An Interview with Robert Wrigley  by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: “Lives of the Animals” strikes me as a poem largely about nature's possession of man and how, once the natural realm has latched onto us, we cannot simply remove it. It also strikes me as a poem that addresses the oftentimes conflicting forces between man and woman and man and the natural world. I’m thinking of the tick “already fastened on and fattening” with the man’s blood and of the “nightly session on the living room floor” with the speaker's wife, which leaves the tick seemingly doomed.

What I find particularly remarkable about “Lives of the Animals” is that even though the man becomes the tick’s salvation— transporting it from certain death to a sort of paradise— the conflict between man, woman, and nature is resolved…but only briefly.

Do you see the poem as a way to briefly resolve or to make sense of the natural order and the conflicted state of the human who lives within and without that order? Is this the “intention” of this particular poem? Do you feel that your poems typically have a particular “intention” or are “about” anything in particular?

Robert Wrigley: Yes. By which I mean, it seems to me that poems—good ones—don’t offer up answers but provoke questions. They’re mediations between experience and contemplation. Sometimes the poet has some “intent” in mind at the outset, but more often it’s the poem that determines its own intent. Without saying too much about the poem—which is to say, without offering up any sort of “official” interpretation, I’d say that the poem is concerned with the country called intimacy, everything from family grooming (for practical reasons) to love-making to the extension of affection or acknowledgement to the animal world, represented here not only the by the cats and the dogs, but by the tick itself. Mark but this tick, I might have written, but the speaker had not need to make his case to the others involved.

AMK: “At the Beach” is a cool poem with a number of circularities working all at the same time: the burrowing and unbeaching of the crustaceans, their eyeless and headless helmets, the father and son, the waves that both “pull and shove,” and of course the gulls who “can not name us either,” which reflects back on the first line of the poem.
Is this circular nature of the poem by design or an effect that was discovered as the poem was being written?

RW: You read very well. The circularities, as you aptly call them, are the poem’s discoveries. The poem means to reflect circularities of all of nature, of life. Just as I said above, I didn’t have this in mind when I began the poem, but the poem found its way there. The map was language—image and sound.

AMK: I tend to think of “At the Beach” as a reflection on that certain loss the father feels; of that desire to be more like the son who doesn’t give a second thought to the little creatures he digs up and, in effect, sends to their deaths.

Reflecting on the first three lines of the poem, I'm wondering if this poem isn’t an ars poetica of sorts— a poem about the writing of poetry itself— and about how language so often fails us, ultimately bringing us back to the same question(s) we set out to answer in the first place. Do you see this poem as a poem about the failure of language? Is it fair to expect so much of language?

RW: Sure it’s an ars poetica. I probably sensed that as I closed in on the poem as it now stands, and while poems about poems tend to irritate me, an ars poetica is different. The fact that the poem in some way enacts or reenacts its own composition is a subsidiary benefit. And after all, the poet’s job is to say as much, as many things, as possible in the fewest words.

AMK: My last few questions regard your larger body of work. When I read your work, it’s hard not to read the “I” in this poem as, in fact, you, the poet. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on your poetry and the first person. Do your poems usually employ a speaker or should we read them as personal accounts? Likewise, when you read contemporary poetry, do you think of the “I” as the actual poet who writes the poem or as an outside speaker who the poet presents to us?

RW: I heard the fiction writer Ron Carlson once say of this stories that they “are all based on personal experience, whether I’ve had it or not.” Bingo. The speaker in my poems is not me but is often some “version” of me, some character I might be said to be based on. Many of my poems feature a third person protagonist or main character that is equally some version of me. What’s the difference? Not much. I too get sick of the first person in poems, especially when the poems are mere testimonials about the poet’s vast sensitivities or sufferings. That’s horseshit. On the other hand, if the poem is real and vital, the point of view or the vantage of the voice is just what it ought to be. I have that hope about my poems all the time.

AMK: Finally, what are your thoughts on the artifice/aesthetic of individual poems within a book and of the book as a work of art in and of itself? Meaning, does each poem exist on its own plane or is each poem a spoke in the wheel. Does each poem act as a microcosm for the book, or is each poem an independent entity. Is it, perhaps, both?

RW: Both. Frost purportedly said “If a book of poems contains 24 poems, the book itself is the 25th.” I try very very hard to write “books” that are just that, but finally it’s individual poems that last, that get canonized. Go down the hall in any English Department and stick your head in any doorway and ask the professor inside to name three books by Robert Frost (not counting the complete poems). Few will be able to do it, and no one worked harder to make his books cohesive, fully realized wholes than Frost did. In other words, it’s a kind of cruel fate for poets. Then again, it makes them noble and better looking, don’t you think? Seriously, a poem sometimes can function as the heart of a book, but when it does, you have to sort of wonder about the poems around it, if they’re worthy.